


In Another Time

by thelonggoodbye



Category: Original Work
Genre: Diary/Journal, F/F, Inaccurate depictions of grad school, Letters, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-23
Updated: 2020-04-23
Packaged: 2021-03-01 17:14:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,061
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23810635
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thelonggoodbye/pseuds/thelonggoodbye
Summary: Kate was not the sort of person things happened to. That held true until she found the diary of a woman who wasn't quite done with it, yet.
Relationships: Female Historian/Time Traveler from the Past, Original Female Character/Original Female Character
Comments: 1
Kudos: 3
Collections: Unsent Letters 2020





	In Another Time

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Rubynye](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rubynye/gifts).



> For Rubynye. I hope you enjoy it!
> 
> Title is from Sappho: "Someone, I tell you, will remember us, even in another time."

Sterling was beginning to feel like a prison. Kate leaned back in her chair and pushed her notebook away. Had the ceiling always been that industrial shade of white? When she blinked, she realized with some surprise that her eyes itched and there was a low, throbbing pain in her temples. 

Across the table, Ruth glanced up and said, "Brain breaks only make it harder to get back into it."

With a friend like Ruth, Kate probably could have gotten by without a thesis advisor, or her mom. "Bathroom break. Watch my stuff?" She didn't wait for Ruth' assent. Neither of them would be leaving soon, not when they both had a thesis deadline coming up, and Ruth wouldn't be any more likely to notice a thief stealing Kate's laptop with a warning than she would be otherwise. 

It was on the way back from the bathroom that Molly called Kate over to the reference desk. On the counter was a slim black book. "I found this in the mathematics section."

Kate was, despite the lack of sleep, mostly sure her thesis was not on anything math-related and that she'd planned her entire life around avoiding the subject. She wasn't confident enough to say so to Molly with any certainty. "That's cool," she said.

Molly rolled her eyes. "It was actually upsetting, since it means no one here files anything right, but whatever. It's not like it's a one of a kind diary that should be preserved in the archives." She paused for a response. Kate was a silent audience. Molly was the sort of person whose natural drama had driven her towards the theater, where a lack of talent had led to several thrilling relationships with burgeoning actresses, one of whom was on Broadway now. Or so Molly said. She picked up the thread again at the end of an uncomfortable pause, "It's a diary from a very bored housewife. Not Anaïs Nin level of intrigue, but girl was getting busy."

That got through the mist in Kate's head. "Seriously? In the math section? You're a gem."

"Would I ever lie to you? Sign it out and it's all yours."

Kate did and Molly handed it over. "Thank you!"

"Good luck. Remind Ruth to eat something soon. Her blood sugar will drop and I can't have a repeat of the incident with the freshman from last week."

Kate nodded half-heartedly, but Ruth was a grown woman anyway and her attention was already on the book. She knew better than to read and walk in Molly's line of sight by then, if only barely, so she forced herself to admire the clean lines of the cover and slightly faded gold-edged pages until she slid into her seat. The cover was leather and remarkably well-preserved for being in a random section of the library for who knows how long. 

She turned to the first page. Its musty scent was familiar, like any other old diary she'd read, but with a hint of lilac perfume. In an elegant, slanted script, it read, Property of Adelaide Brown. If found, please return to proper owner. It listed Adelaide's contact info and Kate copied it into her notes. Maybe Adelaide or her descendants hadn't moved in the sixty-some years since the diary started. 

The first five pages of the journal were a disappointment and, she realized, a deterrent. After the grocery lists and recipes ended, page six started. 

_July 1, 1957  
R. has asked us to her July Fourth party and of course I accepted on our behalf immediately. John will be displeased, he planned to have his sister over, but of course I cannot stand her or the kids. It'll hardly be long before John decides it's time for children of his own, or R.'s husband does, and then where will we be?_

_I find them perfectly horrendous. Maybe one's own would be suitable, even fun, but I'm too young anyway._

_I plan to make the best of these years, before John starts paying attention._

_July 6, 1957  
Home from R.'s only an hour ago. Haven't slept! John gave up early and has yet to wake up; he won't be pleased with me. R and I spent all night together. She hung off my arm as if I was the host and her the hostess. Sometimes, I marvel at how well-suited we are._

_July 13, 1957  
R. leaves for the week tomorrow. To the beach with the in-laws. Better luck next time, R. I'll miss her, I will, but already I have an invitation to M's. It will hardly be the same (I wonder that anyone could replace R., but a week is hardly any time at all to miss her). Before we parted she said, "I feel as though you make sense of all the poems, my love."_

_I am not a poet. But she has read to me, in the lawn behind her house, where the fence is high enough the neighbors cannot look in. I put my head on her lap and she runs her fingers through my hair as she reads._

_July 20, 1957  
R. is home! I've seen the car, not her. But tomorrow, tomorrow I see R._

_July 21, 1957  
R. came as soon as she could get away. We went up to my room and she showed me how much she missed me. It was bliss--hours of it. She truly opened me up like no other, like John has never managed._

_August 31, 1957  
R.--gone._

After R. left, the diary had gone unused for the better part of a year. Whoever the mysterious diarist was, she’d taken R.’s disappearance hard. Pages after that were filled with the same looping handwriting, but Kate needed a break.

She glanced up. Ruth was buried in her own work as usual. "Ruth," she said.

Bringing Ruth out of her work required a gentle approach, so as to not startle a wild horse who had locked herself in a library to compensate for some fear of the wider world. "Ruth," she said again. "Coffee?"

Finally, she looked up. "Coffee?"

Kate nodded. "Do you want your usual?"

Ruth nodded and tossed her wallet over. "Blonde lady by the math section. Your type. Might as well take a break."

Kate extracted a five and tossed Ruth her wallet back. "You're one to talk."

"You're a better writer than me and you were smart enough to do your research in English," Ruth mumbled. She was already most of the way back into whatever translation she was pouring over. "She's gorgeous and looking over here. That's all I'll say."

When Kate glanced over, the math section was empty. She shrugged. Ruth had been known to hallucinate. 

The bright sun outside was a shock to her system. Kate stood in the doorway for a moment, blinking. After this week things would calm down for a bit, but then she would have to grade undergraduate essays, do her own coursework, or meet another deadline for her thesis. And outside the sun kept shining and students hurried past, late for class or meeting friends.

“Excuse me,” a soft voice said. 

Kate startled. “Fuck, I’m so sorry.” She meant to move out of the way, but she’d made the mistake of looking at the woman standing there.

“It’s perfectly fine,” the stranger said. She was wearing a soft-looking light blue dress and her blonde hair came down past her shoulders in waves. “Maybe you could help me. I seem to have misplaced something.”

“Oh yeah, sure.” Kate felt too awkward for her own limbs, suddenly, a problem she hadn’t run into for years, and she was still blocking the door. “What are you looking for?”

“A diary,” the woman said. “It was my--it belonged to my grandmother.”

“I haven’t seen,” Kate started to say, but then she realized how dumb she was being. “Oh! Black leather, kind of small, gorgeous handwriting?”

“Yes!” The woman looked delighted. Her smile lit up her whole face and made her come alive. In the sunlight, she looked like she was glowing. “Her name was Adelaide. Mine is too. I was named for her.”

“I’ll get it for you. Molly--she’s the librarian, the one with the glasses at the desk--found it in the math section. It’s perfect for my thesis so she thought I could use it. I didn’t realize someone was still caring for it. I read part of it. I hope that’s okay?” She told herself sternly to shut up. It didn’t work.

Adelaide, at least, didn’t seem to mind. She was still smiling up at Kate. “What’s your thesis on? I would, I’m sure my grandmother would like to know her words were helping someone.”

“I’m studying the culture of married lesbians in the ‘50s,” Kate explained. She would talk about the subject for hours, if someone would let her, but she’d been to enough family dinners to know to keep the explanations to a minimum. “I’m looking at the written traces that survived them and focusing on the tangible moments of their lives.”

“I didn’t know you could research a thing such as that,” Adelaide said. She smiled again and it lit up her face. She looked as though Kate had given her wonderful news.

“You can study anything in a Ph.D. program.” Kate wasn’t sure what to say, but she didn’t want to go back in and give the diary to Adelaide and lose both her and her grandmother forever. “Can I buy you a coffee?”

Adelaide nodded. “I would like that, thank you.”

Deja Brew was Kate’s favorite coffee shop in the city. It was a stroke of luck that it was right across from the library, one of the sort of things that is a quiet, almost unnoticed blessing until you have reason to require good coffee and a nice atmosphere. It was a small place, and the walls were covered in enough art from patrons that it felt cluttered and homey. 

Inside, Adelaide headed right to a table. “Should we sit here?”

“Works for me!” Internally, Kate cringed at herself. But she hadn’t expected Adelaide to want to stay and talk. “What can I get you?”

“Decaf, please. Black.” Adelaide fidgeted. “I’m so sorry, but I don’t have any money. I wasn’t expecting this.”

“My treat. For accidentally stealing your grandma’s diary. That definitely means you deserve a coffee or three. Maybe even dinner.”

“It’s not necessary. I am the one who accidentally left it.”

“Still, a person isn’t meant to go around reading diaries that don’t belong to them,” said Kate, conveniently forgetting that she had based her degree and probable future job on doing just that. “I’ll be right back.”

Adelaide was the sort of person who drank coffee slowly. Normally, Kate didn’t have the patience for people who did anything slowly and personally viewed coffee as more of a means to an end, but Adelaide made sipping it look like an experience. Her light pink lipstick left smudges on the rim of the mug, not quite a perfect impression of her lips, but close. Kate couldn’t look away. 

She was also an enigma, dodging almost every direct question about her life Kate tried to ask. It started with, “What do you do with your days? Are you in school too?”

Adelaide’s eyes had widened for a moment, but she schooled her expression quickly. If Kate hadn’t been staring right at Adelaide, trying to memorize her features, she might have missed it entirely. “Not school. It wasn’t ever for me and then, well, people in my family didn’t go on in school. Now I do this and that.”

Kate’s family was all mystified, if impressed, by her decision to go to grad school. But a few years in and she spends all her days surrounded by the kind of people who go to grad school, and there was this sudden churning in her stomach, because she was a one-trick pony. She could talk about her thesis, and the mystery of ephemera, and throw words like liminal and construction around to describe the way she felt about her life, but she wasn’t good at actually having a life. 

Small talk she could do, though. So she asked, “Where are you from?”

“Here,” Adelaide said. “I’ve lived here all my life. Sometimes I think it’ll be where I die.”

“What about traveling? Have you been anywhere?”

“I went to New York, once. For my--well, it doesn’t matter. It was magical.”

Birthday, Kate put into that blank, or maybe graduation, but neither of them quite fit. Whatever Adelaide was talking around, Kate wasn’t going to pry, even if she wanted to. Which she did. “I love New York. My brother lives there.”

When Adelaide finished the last of her coffee, she said, “I should get home soon.”

Kate checked her watch on instinct. They’d sat down in the cafe around 1:30 and it was almost 3. “Shit, Ruth’s coffee.”

“We couldn’t forget that,” Adelaide said, a very serious expression on her face. Kate had already told her all about Ruth. “It would be akin to forgetting to bring a dying man his only solace, the bottle.”

Kate didn’t really know what to say, so she just smiled back and went to wait in line for Ruth’s drink. Adelaide spoke like the 1950s come to life. If she hadn’t said she’d lived in their city her whole life, Kate might have thought Adelaide was a debutante who hadn’t quite shaken all of her roots yet. 

The walk back to the library was quiet. Most students were in class or off doing something else. Kate automatically held the door open for Adelaide, who ducked her head in thanks. “I’ve had a lovely time with you, Kate,” she said, seconds before the hush of the library descended on them both. 

Kate nodded back. Her head didn’t feel as though it was connected to her. “Me too.” She was surprised she found the words to respond. In the cafe, conversation flowed easily, but now she felt awkward again. 

“Can I see you again?” she blurted out.

“I’d like that.” Adelaide smiled at her and then drifted off into the math section. A few moments later, she completely disappeared into the stacks. 

It was only ten minutes later when she was staring dismally at Ruth’s moving pencil that she realized not only that she hadn’t gotten Adelaide’s number, but that she hadn’t returned her grandmother’s diary either. 

The thing might have been all right, if Adelaide was still in the math section when she realized. But she wasn’t, nor was she anywhere else in the building, despite the fact that the security guard swore she hadn’t left.

And the thing might have ended there, with Kate in possession of a diary she wasn’t sure she was allowed to finish reading, except that the next week she came back to the bathroom to find Ruth actually looking up from her work, annoyed. In Kate’s seat sat Adelaide. Her hair was longer, more than it could have grown in a week, and touched the top of the chair behind her. It looked real, but Kate wasn’t confident in her ability to spot extensions. 

“It’s research,” Ruth was in the middle of saying as Kate came into hearing distance, “and I like doing it. There’s more available now than when we came from.”

“I understand the urge,” Adelaide said. She picked up one of Kate’s pens and put it back down. Kate wished she could see Adelaide’s face, because the wistful tone in her voice was heartbreaking. “It seems like a lot to give up, is all.”

Ruth shrugged. “You’ll make your choices and I’ll make mine. It’s not like we’ll ever see each other again.”

“I suppose,” Adelaide said.

“You can’t keep coming back.” Ruth frowned. Whatever expression she say on Adelaide’s face, she must not have liked it. “You really can’t. Kate isn’t stupid.”

Thanks, Kate thought, but she felt stupid then. She couldn’t even begin to figure out what they were talking about, or how Ruth knew Adelaide. Why hadn’t she mentioned anything before?

When Kate had told Ruth she hadn’t gotten Adelaide’s number, the other woman had shrugged and said, “Shit happens. Aren’t hour-long conversations that lead to nothing your M.O. anyway?”

After that, Kate had left the subject drop. Ruth wasn’t interested in hearing about her personal problems and Kate wasn’t interested in talking about something when she couldn’t go back in time and fix it.

Finally, Adelaide spoke, so softly that Kate had to strain to hear her, “When you left, Ruth, I didn’t know what to do with myself. I wouldn’t have followed you here if I felt I had any other option.”

“Then commit. You’re miserable there anyway. I’ve read your diary, you left it here for Kate on purpose, didn’t you?”

Ruth had read it? When? Kate felt protective of it, suddenly.

“But you can’t.” Ruth bit her lip. “It’s an aged diary. It’s authentic. So either you left it in the library in 1958 or you’re around here somewhere.” 

Kate blinked in confusion for a moment at that, because Adelaide was clearly right there. And Kate wasn’t interested in considering the only other thing that made sense. She couldn’t listen to this conversation anymore, either. She’d violated both of their privacy, terribly, and while she couldn’t regret that, she had a lot to think about.

For the first time ever, Kate left the library and all of her belongings behind with no intent to return. 

She walked for a long time. The city wasn’t large, really, but walking it made it feel eternal. When she came to one of the rivers she sat on a rock for a long time watching the geese swim past and the water lap gently at the bank.

It wasn’t until it was almost completely dark that she returned to Sterling. It seemed more welcoming at night, the harsh edges of its brutalist design smoothed out by the soft glow of the streetlights and the fog that settled in for the evening. 

Ruth had left for the night. Sometimes they headed out together, got dinner or drinks, but Kate hadn’t expected her to stay. She also hadn’t planned for the eventuality that Adelaide would have spent hours camping out but there she was in Ruth’s usual seat, her hair forming a curtain that hid her face as she read.

The best, maybe the only, word to describe her was radiant. 

She looked up when Kate approached. “Hello. I wrote you a letter.”

It was sitting on Kate’s closed laptop, written on paper probably ripped out of one of her own notebooks. Her name was written in the same slanted, looping script as the diary. 

“Not your grandmother, then.” Her voice surprised her with its roughness. 

“Not my grandmother,” Adelaide agreed. “I am not very good at expressing myself out loud.”

Kate took the hint. She sat and unfolded the letter, which was creased tightly into thirds. 

_Dearest Kate,_

_I hope you do not find it presumptuous of me to assume you will not return tonight, or to leave this here for you against that possibility. Should you not wish to see me again, please only give a word, or say nothing at all, and I will leave you in peace._

_I hope, however, against hope that you will allow me to explain myself to you, as far as I am able. It is not the sort of story that is easy to explain over a cup of coffee (although that place was delightful--there is nothing like it when I’m from)._

_I was born here, just as I said, however in 1932 rather than the early 1990s. The diary you read was not my grandmother’s but mine, as I am sure you were able to ascertain from the handwriting. My grandmother, while a lovely woman, was Victorian in her thoughts and actions, and it is hard to imagine her traveling through time, albeit accidentally. Nor would she have fallen in love with another woman._

_I met Ruth a few months before I began keeping my diary and was delighted by her company. She opened me up in so many ways I never knew were possible. We not only had the one secret, the one you discovered within a few moments of reading my diary (faster than I could have expected! I prided myself on keeping it all a secret admirably), but another. Ruth discovered first and showed me later how to travel to your time, to the math section of this very library._

_At first, it was hardly anything more than a joke, or at least that was how I viewed it. Until one day Ruth sat me down in her bedroom and said, Adelaide, I am going to leave and I want you to come with me._

_To cut much agony short, I did not._

_I loved her, Kate. Love is not always enough. And sometimes, you find the person you love is not right for you. Such was the way for me and Ruth. Losing her cut me to my core._

_It has been years, since, for her and for me. They are covered in the diary, should you choose to continue reading. You have my express permission. But before you do, I have another confession to make. You will find yourself in its pages, an unrevealed K. Those happenings are in my past, but in your future. When I return to my time, it is only minutes after I left, at most an hour. When I arrive here, I never know when I will be coming. It has taken the better part of a year to return to you in this time, to explain._

_I have come to love the future we have together, such as it is, and you, Kate. I know this is presumptuous, as we are hardly acquainted in your timeline, but it is true. I love you._

_I hope you can find it within your heart to forgive me for my deceptions, and please do not take what you read in here as a solemn promise of your own future. You could move to Los Angeles tomorrow to act in the movies and I could not stop you, nor could the flow of time. We are architects of our own destinies and time itself remains ever malleable._

_But it is a wonderful future and I cannot help but hope you come to see it as I do._

_Yours,  
Adelaide Brown_

Kate didn’t say anything for a long moment after she finished reading. Adelaide’s eyes were on her, steady and waiting. “1957,” she said at last. “I mean, fuck.” She took a deep breath. “Is that even okay to say around you?”

Adelaide arched one eyebrow. “I am hardly a blushing virgin.”

“My grandma would’ve hated it if I said that in front of her,” Kate muttered. She felt young next to Adelaide, which was fair, since she was several decades younger. “I don’t know how to deal with any of this.”

“You have time to think over it. I will always come back.”

Kate was quiet. She looked back down at the letter, at Adelaide’s handwriting, at the words, I love you.

“Fuck it. I don’t need time.” She stood and walked around the table to kneel at Adelaide’s side. She wrapped one hand around the back of Adelaide’s neck and pulled her into a kiss. 

It was immediately clear this was not the first time Adelaide had kissed Kate. She took Kate’s chin in both hands and readjusted her, biting gently at Kate’s bottom lip in the way that always made it impossible for her not to moan. 

“I love you,” Adelaide said into Kate’s neck a few minutes later, after Molly had come to warn them about public indecency with a sad, “Honestly, you should know better by now. You’re not children, or even undergrads.”

Kate didn’t say it back. But she had all the time in the world and then some. For now, it was enough to simply hold Adelaide’s hand in her own and to smile down at her, knowing that their paths were headed in the same direction.


End file.
